to age, caste, and occupation of persons
who had been actually convicted of revolutionary crimes or killed whilst
committing them. The large majority were between 16 and 25 years of age;
most of them students and teachers; all of them Hindus, and almost all
high-caste Hindus, either Brahmans or Kayasthas--the latter a
writer-caste ranking just below the Brahman caste. These statistics did
not cover the large number of crimes of which the authors escaped
scot-free and were never brought to justice.

Not the least alarming feature of the situation was the attitude of the
Indian public generally towards this epidemic of political crime which
assumed some forms hitherto quite unknown to India and abhorrent to
most Indians. The movement could only be correctly described as an
Anarchist movement in so far as the methods to which it resorted were
largely modelled upon those of Russian anarchists and aimed, like
theirs, at the subversion of the existing Government. It differed
fundamentally from Russian anarchism in that it was directed against
alien rulers of another faith and another civilisation. That it created
a widespread feeling of apprehension and even of detestation amongst the
great majority of peaceful and sober-minded Indians cannot be doubted,
and especially amongst those who watched with alarm the ravages it was
making amongst the younger generation. But few had the courage to carry
reprobation to the length of assisting Government in the detection and
repression of crimes which terrorism made it less dangerous to extenuate
as lamentable exhibitions of a misguided patriotic frenzy. The
Western-educated classes were completely estranged and smarted so
bitterly over the contempt with which their representations and protests
against the policy of Government had been treated that those even of the
more moderate school of politics were content to throw up their hands in
horror and declare that if they were unable to stem the torrent, the
fault lay entirely with the bureaucracy which had killed by long years
of neglect and hostility the influence they might have otherwise been
able to exert over their fellow-countrymen in the hour of stress. The
Extremists boldly threw the whole responsibility for the movement on
British rule and combined with a perfunctory and dubious condemnation of
the crimes themselves an ecstatic admiration for the heroism which had
driven the youth of India to follow the example of the Russian
_in